Japanese Community Formed to Open Shop for Android Apps

A community will be launched to promote the diffusion and development of Google Inc's "Android" platform for mobile phones in Japan Sept 12, 2008.

The community is aimed at succeeding and advancing the activities of the "Android Study Meetings," which have been conducted to give engineers the opportunities to share information about Android.

Professor Fujio Maruyama of Waseda University revealed a memorandum of intent to establish the community at the 9th Android Study Meeting on Aug 25. An opening ceremony will be conducted at Fujisoft Inc's Akihabara Building from 19:00 Sept 12.

Even though it is a community, it will also focus on business. It will aim to establish its G Appli Shop (tentative name), a distribution platform for Android software. G Appli Shop corresponds to the iPhone's "App Store."

As the mechanism to install software under Android has not been revealed, it is uncertain whether or not third parties can freely participate in the application market. But the community will prepare the distribution system in advance.

The Android Study Meetings will be restarted from late October 2008 as well. The previous Android Study Meetings primarily targeted developers with a certain degree of experience. But, at the new meetings, an opportunity to actually build up an application that works on Android, for example, will be offered to beginners. For experienced engineers who have already made an application, questions concerning the SDK classes and the use of packages will be covered.

Working groups will be set up by theme under the community. Along with the groups on G Appli Shop and Android Study Meetings, more groups such as content, mash-up and Dalvik VM working groups will be formed. The Dalvik VM working group is, for example, planning a code reading competition after Android's source code is disclosed.